Love is like Pi
by Melodylink
Summary: Natural, irrational, and very important . . . Usagi learns about quadratic equations, important focusing techniques, and a bit about Mamoru baka into the bargain


**Love is like Pi**

_In which Usagi learns about quadratic equations, important focusing techniques, and a bit about Mamoru-baka into the bargain…_

The familiar drone of the Haruna-sensei's voice filled the sleepy classroom. Tuning out the sound, Usagi drew idly on her page, tracing lazy patterns through a hazy fog. Her pen made silky black marks in her pristine notebook. Almost, she could feel herself drifting towards sleep.

Daydreams began to drift through her head. Usagi propped her head in her hand, and started to dream.

_She was standing with Motoki on the edge of a cliff, with the sunset blazing romantically in the background. He was dressed in a suit making him look more dashing than usual. She was, of course, dressed in the most beautiful clothes imaginable. Motoki took hold of her hands, gazed into her eyes, and was about to confess his undying love for her, when she stumbled, and fell over the cliff. She opened her mouth to scream in fear, but before she could utter a sound, Tuxedo Kamen swooped down to catch her, enfolding her in his rose-scented embrace. He carried her off, and placed her down with infinite gentleness on the ground. _

"_Oh, Tuxedo Kamen-sama," she breathed, looking up into his shadowed face. "You saved my life."_

_He seemed equally caught up in the moment. He took hold of her hands, much as Motoki had done, and said seriously, "I would do anything for you, dearest, loveliest Usagi-chan. I am only glad that I was able to help, in even the smallest way." He took a breath, and was suddenly on one knee before her. _

"_I must tell you this before I lose my nerve. I love you, beautiful Usagi-chan. I never want to be parted from you from this day forward. Usagi-chan…"_

"_Yes," Usagi whispered, hardly daring to breathe._

"_Will you marry me?"_

"Yes!"

Usagi blinked, and realized that she had just shouted her answer to the entire classroom.

Usagi's jaw snapped shut, and her face flushed red in embarrassment. Haruna-sensei stalked over to her desk.

"Do you have a problem with the work, Tsukino-san?" she asked icily.

Usagi shrank into her chair. "No, of course not."

Haruna-sensei narrowed her eyes. "Then you will have no difficulty demonstrating the problems on the board for the class, will you?"

Usagi panicked. "Uh-"

Luckily for her, the shrill tones of the bell saved her from certain humiliation. Haruna-sensei dismissed the class, and Usagi started to gather up her books with relief, until a voice cut through the noise of the class.

"Ah, Tsukino-san, if you would remain for a moment after class?"

Her heart plummeted again.

* * *

"So Haruna-sensei says that I have to be able to do these equations for her in class tomorrow or she'll call my parents _again,_ and my dad'll definitely kill me this time!" 

Usagi was pouring her heart out again to a sympathetic Motoki. She slumped over a bewildering array of textbooks and scrawled notes, slurping on a milkshake straw dejectedly.

From across the arcade, Mamoru had been watching Usagi, and he was moved by an unexpected impulse to help. If he craned his head a bit to the side and squinted slightly, he thought he could make out the numbers scrawled across her notebook. It was apparent enough to him where she was going wrong. A simple mistake made at the beginning of her equations was giving her the wrong answer every time. He could probably show her what she was doing wrong - that is, if Usagi would let him help her…

"Hey, Odango-Atama,"

He slid into the booth opposite her. She glared at him.

"What do you want, baka?"

"Want some help?" The words were out of his mouth before he had time to stop them. Too late, he attempted to school his expression so that he looked merely vaguely interested, maybe a touch condescending. Mamoru wasn't sure how well he was doing though. There was a tingling feeling in his cheeks, and he had the urge to smile nervously at her instead. He had a nasty suspicion that if she looked up at him he would blush.

He was safe for the time being though. Usagi didn't even glance at him. Instead she scowled down at the papers in front of her.

"I hate maths," she said grumpily.

"Why?" asked Mamoru curiously. "I mean, I know you suck at it, but is there a deeper reason?"

_That_ made her look up at him, her eyes suddenly blazing. "I do not suck at it!"

Mamoru looked at her, and then at her maths paper, and then back at her, one eyebrow cocked.

"Okay, okay, so I'm not brilliant either," said Usagi, her cheeks flushing. "I thought you wanted to help me here."

"I do, I do," said Mamoru, laughing. "I just wanted to try and understand why you hate it so. You know, get an insiders perspective on your problem. Maybe if I know why you hate it so, I could help you understand it a bit better."

Usagi stared at Mamoru suspiciously, sure he was making fun of her, but his dark blue eyes were serious, with only a hint of amusement in their depths. Unsettled, Usagi ignored him for a moment in favour of trying the next problem in her text. She picked up her pen and wrote a few numbers, checked the answer in the back of the book, then very quietly screamed to herself before scribbling them out in frustration. Her blue eyes looked up at Mamoru a little ruefully.

"I guess I hate that there is only one answer for it. I mean, you are either right, or you are wrong. There's no chance to get away with bullshit like you can in Literature Studies or something really vague like that. It sucks."

Mamoru took the pen off her, and started to demonstrate the sum for her.

"That's exactly what I like about Maths," he said. "It's so… liberating. I mean, with essay based subjects like literature and history, you're right, you can waffle on, and no one will mark you down for it. But with maths…"

Usagi cocked her head on the side, watching as Mamoru's long brown fingers made quick, decisive marks on the page.

"Maths has a simplicity about it that is almost beautiful. Find the right formula, do the right sums, and there it is on your page, perfect. There's nothing else like it in the whole world."

"Okay, hold it right there," warned Usagi. "If you are going to start a mini-lecture on the beauty of maths, I'll fall asleep in my chocolate sundae."

Mamoru laughed. "Okay, okay," he said. "Let me see if I can put it into terms that you can empathise with a little more."

Usagi laughed. "There is nothing that could make me empathise with maths," she declared emphatically. "Maths and I have about as much in common as … well, as bicycles and goldfish do." She grinned at him. "Zilch."

"Is that so?" asked Mamoru. "I think I could put it in a way…" He put the pen down in front of him and turned to face her.

"Maths…" he stopped a moment, and cleared his throat, delaying. Usagi watched him curiously. She had never seen Mamoru nervous before, and it was rather unsettling. Then again, they had never really had a conversation _sans_ insults before, so the weirdness was, in a sense, built in to the situation.

"You could say that maths … is like love," he said finally.

"What!" Usagi couldn't have been more surprised if Mamoru had just sprouted green antennae. "You can't possibly be serious," she said, beginning to laugh.

Mamoru laughed as well, and relaxed his posture. "All right, I know it sounds stupid to you now, but hear me out," he said. "Seriously. I've got a theory."

"You and your theories," scoffed Usagi, but she looked up at him anyway, waiting for him to continue. He glanced at her, and then picked up the pen and started to demonstrate the next problem while he explained (in order to avoid looking at her, she rather thought).

"I used to have trouble doing equations like this when I was younger," he said. "I just couldn't understand how they worked. Hundreds of teachers tried to make me understand them. I went to thousands of tutorials, did millions of sums. No dice. I just didn't get it."

Numbers danced across the page under his guidance of his slender brown fingers, and Usagi almost forgot to listen, so entranced was she in watching him solve equations with seemingly effortless grace.

"But then one day, it all changed. I was doing the same things that I had been doing all along, but suddenly, I was doing them right. Something had clicked. It was like I had been fumbling around in a darkened room, bumping into the furniture and generally making a mess of things. But then I stumbled on the light switch and everything became clear. That's how it was with maths. All of a sudden, it made sense to me. It was like a switch had been flicked somewhere, and everything that had been at once both complicated and confusing for me became simple."

"That's great," ventured Usagi. "But you still haven't told me what this has to do with love."

"Love…" The numbers on the page slowed down to a trickle, and his face grew more serious. "Love is still very complicated and confusing for me."

Mamoru suddenly looked very vulnerable, and Usagi had to control a ridiculous urge to put her arms around him. She settled instead for touching him lightly on the arm in what was meant to be a sympathetic gesture. He almost jumped at her touch, and she drew back at once, but he turned and smiled quickly at her, that strange half-smile. Was her heart beating faster?

"But," he continued after a moment, "I like to think that someday, that will change. The lights will come on, in a manner of speaking, and I will understand love, just like I understand these equations." He put the pen down and waved his hands in the air vaguely, trying to explain. Usagi watched him curiously. His eyes were alight with feeling. "It's out there, like some huge glowing beacon in the sky. And someday, something will click, and I will be able to understand, and the truth of it will still be there, waiting for me." He laughed, a bit shamefaced. "It sounds stupid, I know, but it's comforting somehow."

Usagi smiled shyly at him. "It doesn't sound stupid," she said softly.

Mamoru gestured at her notebook. "What I mean is that just because you don't understand these equations now, it doesn't mean that you never will." He smiled at her. "It's just a matter of finding the light switch."

Usagi felt her heart skip queerly. The part of Usagi that wasn't focused on maths and her impending humiliation and tongue-lashing, noted with a strange thrill how really beautiful his eyes were. A deep, glorious blue, like the sky at twilight. To cover her confusion, she reached over for the pen, at the same time as Mamoru's fingers were closing over it. Their hands brushed, and an electric tingle shot straight from her hand up her arm and through her chest to settle somewhere at the base of her stomach. They both jerked their fingers away, as if burned. Usagi could feel the blush race traitorously to her face. Jerking her eyes to Mamoru's face, she could see that the tips of his ears were glowing a faint pink as well.

Mamoru cleared his throat and picked up the pen again. The moment was broken, for now, would not be forgotten. In the meantime…

"Now, this is how you solve the equation for y. First, start with the single numbers…"

* * *

Usagi stood in front of the class, vainly trying to conceal her shaking hands behind her skirt. Haruna-sensei finished writing the equations on the whiteboard, and stepped back, a predatory gleam in her eyes. 

"You may begin," she announced.

Usagi wished that the ground would open up and swallow her instead. The classroom was filled with expectant faces, some sympathetic, some amused, but all watching her far too intently for comfort. Usagi turned her back on them and faced the whiteboard, grasping the marker in fingers gone clammy and cold with fear.

All too aware of the waiting eyes boring holes in the back of her shirt, Usagi raised the marker with shaking hands and touched the tip to the whiteboard. The dark blue ink made silky marks on the pristine surface. Usagi stared at it, paralysed in her terror. The numbers and equations she had so painstakingly learnt last night had fled her brain, and white noise was roaring in her ears. For a moment, she thought she might faint.

As if from a great distance, she admired the contrast of the dark blue ink on the white surface. The colour of the ink was quite pretty really. Now, where had she seen blue like that before?

_A deep, glorious blue, like the sky at twilight…_

She smiled then, and remembered another pair of eyes smiling at her. There was a voice that went with the eyes, a warm voice, vibrating with a strange joy in something she could only faintly understand. She concentrated on the voice, remembering the warm words, and the tingling nearness of his presence. The marker moved in her hand without conscious direction from her brain. Numbers, and then equations flowed in dark blue ink across the pristine whiteboard.

The class sat in stupefied silence for a breathless moment. Then, as Usagi continued to scrawl swift numbers on the board without apparent hesitation, they started to whisper spiritedly among themselves. Even Haruna-sensei seemed lost for words as she watched her worst pupil complete problem after problem on the board.

Usagi ignored them all, concentrating on the memory of Mamoru's voice. Ten minutes later she stepped back from the board and capped the lid of her marker. To the surprise of the entire class (including herself) she had managed to finish every single one of the equations Haruna-sensei had set for her.

And for the very first time, she got them all right.


End file.
